Best Books of the 21st Century

An ordinary man and his extraordinary story. You'll want a copy for you and one for someone you love.Shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. One of the New York Times's 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. "A hypnotic and electrifying Irish tale that...

WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE • “[Han] Kang viscerally explores the limits of what a human brain and body can endure, and the strange beauty that can be found in even the most extreme forms of renunciation...

This gutting memoir is a love letter to Joan's late husband, a prayer for her daughter, and the story of a winding search for peace after tremendous loss.NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • From one of America’s...

When We Cease to Understand the World shows us great minds striking out into dangerous, uncharted terrain. Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schroedinger: these are among the luminaries into whose troubled minds we are thrust...

Now an HBO series: the first volume in the New York Times–bestselling “enduring masterpiece” about a lifelong friendship between two women from Naples (The Atlantic).Beginning in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the...

In prose that shimmers, Hua Hsu gives tender elegy to a pivotal friend abruptly lost, reminding us of the impacts of unlikely connections and the persistent ripple of memory. Crisp and spellbinding, Stay True is a coming of age memoir that...

Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and lucid, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing over an oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her student in storytelling exercises. She meets other writers for dinner. She goes...

One of the most groundbreaking memoirs of the twenty-first century, Nelson’s blazingly intelligent and emotionally perceptive account of her partner Harry’s gender fluidity is luminous, hugely enlightening reading. Nominated for the...

SALLY ROONEY NAMED TO THE 2019 TIME 100 NEXT LIST - WINNER OF THE SUNDAY TIMES  YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD - ONE OF BUZZFEED'S BEST BOOKS OF THE DECADE - NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY VOGUE AND SLATE AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF...

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEARThe New York Times - The Washington Post - The Wall Street Journal - NPR - Vanity Fair - Vogue - Minneapolis Star Tribune - St. Louis...

There are few modern writers more widely recognized for their brilliance than Cormac McCarthy, and this is him at his best, eviscerating the traditional Western novel and shining bright lights on the atrocities committed in America’s westward...

A deeply profound, moving and emotional work that examines the intimate ties between families bound by choice rather than blood. This is a heartbreaking story sure to be solidified as a modern classic — you'll want to keep the tissues close by...

CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED, NATIONAL BESTSELLER •Time Magazine #1 Book of the Year • National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • Winner of the Stonewall Book Award • Double finalist for the Lambda Book Award •Nominated for the GLAAD Media AwardAlison...

From the New York Times–bestselling author of My Brilliant Friend, this novel of a deserted wife’s descent into despair—and rage—is “a masterpiece” (The Philadelphia Inquirer).The Days of Abandonment is the gripping story of an Italian woman’s...

The brilliant graphic memoir of growing up in Iran during and after the Islamic revolution. Marjane Satrapi lived through the Iranian Revolution as a little girl. This is her classic memoir-in-comic-strips, the story of a child entangled in the history...

Donna Tartt, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for her most recent novel, The Goldfinch, established herself as a major talent with The Secret History, which has become a contemporary classic. Under the influence of their charismatic...

Nobel prize-winning author of Beloved, Toni Morrison's debut novel immerses us in the tragic, torn lives of a poor black family - Pauline, Cholly, Sam and Pecola - in post-Depression 1940s Ohio. Unlovely and unloved, Pecola prays each night for blue eyes...

"Brilliantly faceted and extremely funny. . . . While I was reading it, I was making a list of all the people I wanted to send it to, until I realized that I wanted to send it to everyone I know." — Ann Patchett. “Improbably charming...will...

A classic among the dark academia genre, The Secret History is a captivating thriller about a group of college students who slowly lose their morality as they search to transcend the triviality of their own lives. Tartt’s writing is lyrically...

A multilayered meditation on beauty, memory, and regret, this intimate seven-novel sequence from the Norwegian Nobelist is an transcendent exploration of two versions of the same life – that of two ageing painters, one consumed by alcohol,...